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Photo courtesy of Vattenfall. Caption by Katy Human.
While offshore wind has not yet taken off in the United States, in some parts of the world, such as the North Sea, off-shore wind farms are becoming the “new normal.” But wait! Maybe wind turbines have unintended consequences, as this article from NOAA ClimateWatch Magazine suggests:
Wind turbines produce more climate-friendly power than generators based on fossil fuels. But the turbines also produce wakes – ripples, waves, vortices, and other disturbances in the air that can stretch at least a few kilometers long at times. These turbulent wakes can affect power output and cause damage at downwind turbines. Normally, the wakes are invisible to the naked eye, but in the photograph above, they have churned the air over the North Sea into furrows of clouds….
Why do clouds form downwind of these offshore wind turbines? It’s evident from the haze that the air upwind (in the foreground of the photo) is nearly saturated with water vapor. Maybe when that moisture-laden air hits the turbines, it slows and cools, condensing out water to form clouds.
Will anti-wind advocates use this new research to fight off shore wind in the US? No doubt.
In another article, “The New Climate Normals: Gardeners Expect Warmer Nights,” reports on the upcoming new “Climate Normals” report from NOAA that will readjust what is meant by “normal” when weathermen and women discuss weather events.
Updated each decade, the U.S. Climate Normals are 30-year averages of many pieces of weather information collected from thousands of weather stations nationwide. Each time they are updated, an old decade is dropped, and a new one added. Starting in July, when you hear that a day was hotter, or colder, or rainier than normal, that ”normal” will be a little different from what it was in the past.
This time around, the 30-year window for the U.S. Climate Normals is 1981-2010: the decade 1971-1980 was dropped, and 2001-2010 was added. Since the ’70s were an unusually cool decade, while 2001-2010 was the warmest ever recorded, it is not surprising that the average temperature rose for most locations. For the United States as a whole, it was not daytime highs (maximum temperatures) but overnight lows (minimum temperatures) that rose the most compared with the 1970s.
Updating the 30 year “normals” in effect moves the goal posts of what we mean by “normal” or expected climate, meaning that acknowledging the human-impacts on changing climate may be lost in the noise, as it seems to have been in a recent New York Times article on drought, that seems to deliberately avoid mentioning human induced climate changes.
There is also an emerging “new” normal in some climate adaptation circles is the idea that reducing risk and dealing with the climate change already in the pipeline due to the long-term momentum of human impacts requires far more than moving from fossil fuels to renewables. In the US in particular for the past several decades we’ve put our eggs in the basket of “reducing carbon emissions through national policies and international treaties”. As a result, we’ve done little or nothing to prepare for changes that are already well underway.
But there are indications this tide is turning. The U.S. Navy Task Force Climate Change is one example of an effort to tackle issues like the 1-1.5 meter sea level rise over the next century and ice free summers in the Arctic. Another is the Climate Adaptation Knowledge Exchange, or CAKE, which is collecting case studies of efforts to prepare for climate change around the world.
